Pirate rap song video for halloween

I think the title says it all. Original rap song, original music, special effects, and more. Check out our halloween pirate captain rap song and let us know what you think.

Argh, do ye be a pirate now? Happy halloween.

TechCrunch shows top 30 social networking sites

This post was interesting comscore top growing social networks. The 30 number is odd though as a cut off point, but it illustrates one key thing: Social networks are huge, and growing fast. What would the top 50 look like?

Well, most of them. My former employer (Yahoo) is shutting down it's 360 service...I couldn't get it, even when it launched, and was confused as to why my fellows hopped on the bandwagon. Lycos, Windows are both slowing or declining...well, that makes sense. It's hard for mega corps to do personal well, and it's hard for a once shining star to keep it's fires lit (lycos).

FunAdvice has had a banner year, with amazing growth (you knew last October, we had 76K visitors? unreal). This October, we should top 1 million, or be very close. The top 5 days this month were all over 34K visitors, and weekly grow is still close to 5% at this point.

Thanks to everybody - Dara, Adam, Ericson, Harish and Widhadh (especially Widhadh, as that's my wife) for putting up with me for the last year. I drive hard, I complain, I fuss, and I act like one of my children frequently.

Here's a list of what didn't happen that could have been a big deal for us:
denied to speak at a conference over allegations of "cheating"
denied to present at another conference, probably because we have a business model & a ton more traffic, so it was hard to see how we need the money (we don't).
ignored by Om Malik, even after I spent 30 min on the phone with him :(
no response when introduced to the TechCrunch guys by one of their board members

Can you believe it? All those "connections" we have, amounting to zero. Still, we realize that write ups & fame for FunAdvice aren't really where it's at. Our product is working, our model is sound, and we have a TON of cool features in the pipeline.

The people who use our site, from what I can tell, have never been happier (and that includes me). Got suggestions? Let us know, or contact me personally (thedude) on the site via fun mail. If your idea makes sense, we'll add it to our list.

Thanks everybody.

And we're finally at the beach ;)

If you noticed we were down this morning, it's because we finally went to the beach. Serverbeach, that is. The network issues, the downtime, and the annoying time outs should be largely solved now that we have a higher quality hosting company powering the site.

Given that our stellar engineers just did a crazy, massive update & migration, do let us know if you see anything odd.

Enjoy the zippier performance, too ;)

Fluther seems to be paying for blog spam?

Check this post out & you tell me if it doesn't read like a paid post about Fluther: flurther blog spammy post. Not that I'm saying paying for exposure is necessarily evil...it just reeks of "my product sucks" style desperation ;) And, the paid blogger didn't seem to do enough research, because we're bigger than most of the "competitors" they list. Wondir...I wonder where their traffic went, because FunAdvice is 100x the size of Wondir, according to Quantcast.com.

Yedda is approximately 25% the size of FunAdvice, also according to Quantcast, and Oyogi (the other site mentioned) is nowhere to be found. If you include Answers.com Wiki site (I don't generally, but some do) then FunAdvice is the 4th largest overall Q&A site on the web. If you exclude them (because wiki.answers.com is more wiki than Q&A site) then FunAdvice is 3rd.

The largest Q&A sites are Yahoo Answers (by a mile) and then Answerbag, who is about 3x the size of FunAdvice today, though growing less quickly from what we can tell. Our internal metrics put Answerbag at 3 million uniques per month, which is 3x the size of FunAdvice.

Last year, FunAdvice was 1/12th the size of Answerbag...however, from all reports I've read, FunAdvice is the fastest growing Q&A site out there. :) We're thrilled about that.

Ah, one other comparison thing - we have more international versions than any other site, except for Yahoo Answers. :) So, we're the second biggest player (imho) in the global market, which to us, is a huge deal, because our company is founded by one American & two foreigners ;)

Psst...we're hiring too if you're talented, savvy, and want to work for a start up that's growing like mad.

Rejected for Launch Pad 2007 Conference: does traffic matter?

I just found out we were rejected for the Launchpad 2007 Conference. Darn.

One wonders, though: did traffic weigh into the decision? I'm curious, largely because this month, we're forecasting over 1 million visitors, and still, no paid advertising :)

Perhaps it's my ego talking, but I find it hard to believe that we didn't have the highest amount of traffic of any company applying that didn't have outside funding.

Oh, well. We'll find out the final list of companies in a week or two, and then I can at least smile when I see if FunAdvice is bigger than all of them :)

When did Yahoo Answers launch related questions?

It's interesting that over the 4.5 years FunAdvice has been around (yep, we'll be 5 years old in 2008) we've been copied by:
Yahoo Answers
Answerbag
Yedda
Askville
Live QnA

Basically, all of the large well known Q&A sites have lifted ideas, user interfaces, and more from the implementation they saw on FunAdvice. Or, we all had the same idea, at the same time :)


So today, I'm in a very interesting position - who came up with related questions first, Yahoo Answers, or FunAdvice?

Not the Yahoo Answers implementation.


Now, take a look at the FunAdvice implementation.

What's interesting to me is that we both seem to have about the same number of links in the module, the same placement, etc. I know that we launched ours on August 25th to the public, and had the mock with this integration internally as of May, 2007. When did Yahoo launch theirs, did they copy us? Or was it serendipity?

Do companies always do the right thing? How do they decide?

This post goes out to all the former Yahoo's out there who've moved on from that crazy, sometimes wonderful, and all the time schizophrenic company. Or, for that matter, anybody who's worked at a company that had trouble making decisions & doing the right thing. I hope this inspires you to step it up, and do what you know is right.

Thing is, I worked there from April, 2004 to Jan, 2006. Then my wife & I received a contract to work with them as part of our new consulting firm for another year, until Jan, 2007. During that nearly three year period, I was part of a number of projects, reported to a series of bosses who almost but not quite understood what I was trying to do, and generally speaking, presented to more people at higher levels than anybody else with my title.

So, when reading this morning about Yahoo potentially selling Kelkoo I had to share a few thoughts on TechCrunch. That story has a lot to it, and one of the big deals I tried (and failed) to accomplish at Yahoo was getting them to use the right ccTLD.

Kelkoo, interestingly enough, had the same goal. From Christophe Odin to Pierre Chappaz, to Jean Fabrice, they all agreed that Yahoo should use yahoo.co.uk for their UK operations, same with Spain, Italy, France, and any other country they were involved in. Not just in Europe (though that was their primary concern, because Kelkoo is largely a European company, since shutting down their Brazilian efforts some years prior to the Yahoo acquisition).

How well did these guys sell Yahoo on doing the right thing? Not well, because Ash Patel couldn't justify the plan, (SVP Platforms) because he needed some crazy ROI figure to do the right thing. And the other high level folks (Geoff Ralston, former CPO) couldn't justify selling it either, for similar reasons.

However...what's the ROI on doing the right thing? It shouldn't need to be justified. Not only that, the ROI shouldn't be an issue, period, with the decision of doing the right thing or not. Doing the right thing is it's own reward, and any company that tries to put a profit on doing the right thing has it's priorities all mixed up.

We have those kinds of decisions, as well, at FunAdvice. Should we do this? Or not? Always, we try to figure out what the right thing is to do, and it's not revenue we look at first. It's people. Do people want us to do this? Would people like it if we did that?

Sometimes, that means executing projects that have no basis in increasing revenue, and projects that net - net, have a cost associated because of the lost opportunity of executing a project where the revenue could have been increased.

However, I'm a huge fan of Google, even though I worked at Yahoo for years. They say, in their mission statement & SEC filings, that as a company they try to "do no evil". That's not our motto at FunAdvice, but we always try "to do the right thing".

How do you like to run your business? Is it profit first, and all else second? Or is it like us, like Google, and like those companies that are trying to succeed and make the world a better place by doing the right thing?